


CSI MIA: Breadcrumbs

by lasergirl



Category: CSI: Miami
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-02
Updated: 2010-04-02
Packaged: 2017-10-08 15:10:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/76931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lasergirl/pseuds/lasergirl





	CSI MIA: Breadcrumbs

  
**Title:** Breadcrumbs  
**Fandom:** _CSI: Miami_  
**Rating:** NC-17  
**Notes:** What happens when the only power you have is to leave evidence?  
**Warnings:** Abduction, blood and bondage.

For a moment, Horatio believes he is a child.

Brutally awoken with a hand over his mouth, a knife at his throat, his hands roughly twisted behind him with plastic ties. He's stumbling down the stairs of his front step before he can even think the word; abduction. The hands on his body are hard, leather-gloved. He thinks to yell but a cloth from his own washroom silences him. He's dragged out to the street, a glare of headlights blinds him and something stinging sharp medicates his upper arm. The black yawning gap of a car's trunk swallows him up.

Horatio comes to consciousness blind, on his belly. His hands are numb behind him and the stale-water taste of a facecloth fills his mouth. How long he's been laying like this he cannot tell. Whether the room is dark, or he is sightless he can't decide; it is only when he moves his head, passes his cheek across the roughened floor that he finds he's blindfolded. Then panic begins a circuit of his brain, the scurrying mania of a trapped rodent. When he kicks, his feet are tied. Jesus.

He's beginning to chill in pyjama bottoms and a t shirt, his skin cold against the floor. Cement, he thinks, the scent of it is flat and dusty in his nostrils. He's sure that by now - whatever time it is, and wherever he is - someone has realized he's missing. He can only think that, because beyond that thought there is no hope. He remembers nothing of the man who abducted him, only that he's positive it was a man because of the strength of those hands. He's sure there is a latticework of bruises on his arms where he struggled.

And then carefully, forcing his skittish brain to focus, he rebuilds.

_The AC was busted. The damp Florida heat had the compressor straining so he'd let it rest unplugged. He cracked the window, though, those old-fashioned glass louvers tipped to keep out the rain. He'd always thought they were ridiculous, a hallmark of a sort of 50's Dixie paradise that really didn't exist anymore. Not in Miami with its spires of shining glass and silver, perched at the very edge of the world. With the windows open he could hear the surf booming far out at the breakwater, and the muted beats of race cars running the strip nearby. Horatio was aware of being very small and alone at that moment, as tiny as the smallest shred of evidence in the world - one speck in the eye of God._

When he'd brushed his teeth and stared at himself in the mirror he'd felt old. Even though it was the same bedroom, the same bed, in the same house as it had been for years, he still felt changed. But he'd brushed off that muted panic and fallen into bed to sleep the dreamless sleep of a man who knows the world's secrets.

The window? Open. Did he remember the sound of breaking glass? Horatio presses his forehead into the concrete and wills himself to recall. He thinks if he can get his hands in front of him he'll be able to get the blindfold off, the gag from his mouth. When he stirs, the soles of his feet ache in a dull fire, tiny sparks of pain flashing. He's sure that's blood smeared across his ankles.

His tongue is swollen, jaw forced open by the gag. He knows it now, the taste of cotton and the faintly medical tang of soap. It's nearly overwhelming until he takes a breath, whistling through his nose. Someone must come.

_The evidence doesn't lie. It tells truths in black and whites, present or absent, guilty or not guilty. It condemns a man who leaves a fingerprint or an eyelash or a drop of semen at the scene of a crime. It can read your soul down to the finest print, the double helix of DNA._

When he got into his car to drive home that night he couldn't turn the key. Just sat there, staring at the wall of the garage, willing the fog in his head to subside. A car idled close by, the rattle of it gently shaking his rear-view mirror. When he reached up to adjust it, the car drove away. There were no more incidents on his drive home.

He has to force his shoulder joint against the cement floor to dislocate it, but it is enough leeway for Horatio to squeeze through the loop formed by his own joined hands. He gasps and chokes into the gag, hot bile rising in the back of his throat. His shoulder grinds against itself as he raises his hands to pull the gag from his mouth.

There is cracked blood on his face, and the gag parts reluctantly, leaving a thin fuzz on lips and tongue. For a moment the fresh air is like champagne, flooding his lungs. He breathes freely for the first time. His tingling fingers dig at the cloth over his eyes.

_And there had been the noise of a car door slamming, when the trunk had closed upon him, the roar of a rattling exhaust, the same as the parking lot. Before he'd given into the drug, Horatio had pressed his bleeding feet into the oblique corners, leaving bread crumbs for someone to follow if they knew where to look. His footprints inked in blood on the sidewalk._

Blinding. Horatio squints against the glare, late-afternoon sunlight on a flat plain of white cement. He is in an unknown place, industrial, he thinks, if the footprints of large machinery marked in sawed-off bolts are any indication. The walls are windows, a segmented wall of glittering glass. A warehouse. Or a loft. And he is alone.

He chokes back a cry as he sits up, the wounded yelp of an animal. The blood from his glass-cut feet paints the cement around him, slowly drying in his pyjamas. His fingernails are blue.

_He thought then, in the blackness, that if someone wanted to kill him they'd never get away with it. His body was evidence, every skin cell and hair, every drop of blood and sweat. If he could leave enough pieces of himself he would never be lost._

Horatio weeps, in those lost hours, as he bites with his teeth into the smooth flesh at his palms. When the blood finally creeps out of those ragged holes he is able to work one hand out of the plastic ties; they cut like razorblades across his wrists. When the feeling comes back to his hands he tries his ankles. When he is free, he curls into a ball and closes his eyes, afraid to wake and find out he is dreaming.

And it is there they find him, all blue lips and blood, shivering in the centre of a circle he has painted for all the world to see; Here I Am. Just Follow The Breadcrumbs.

END.

Questions? Comments? Feedback always appreciated.


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